Question about Ubunto for you Linux experts

My friend said try Ubunto. It's free, and you can install and remove thru windows. So I did on my second PC and it seemed to install ok although I wasn't paying attention while it was doing so but upon bootup I get this message. What does this mean and can anything be done about it? I assume it's not good. Luckily it doesn't affect the XP boot part of it.

Did you run the boot-disc verification tool before installing? Unless you order discs from Canonical, you must have burned your own disc, which you should always run the self-checker on.

If the self-checker reveals a fault with the disc, burn a new image but at a much slower speed. I had to do this because it kept messing up the burning at full-speed.

geepondy said:

My friend said try Ubunto. It's free, and you can install and remove thru windows. So I did on my second PC and it seemed to install ok although I wasn't paying attention while it was doing so but upon bootup I get this message.

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I never recommend installing linux through windows. It is known to give some problems.

Ubuntu respects windows just fine, so you should have no fear of installing linux alongside windows, and letting the linux boot manager offer you the dual-boot options. As with any installation, back up your data first... but I have migrated a dozen people from windows to linux by configuring their systems to run dual-boot... and in all the cases windows partitions were undamaged.

I don't know that much about the drivers they use to install and uninstall Linux through windows... but the fact is that it works more or less like a virtual machine... which means you're missing out on a lot of the speed and responsiveness of linux when doing that... as well as data integrity features.

I did it thru this link,
http://wubi-installer.org/

You download the installer run that and then it downloads a much bigger file and installs that, all thru windows, all automatically. I did not burn anything to disk first. The only questions it asks is to pick a drive to use and the size you want allocated towards the Linux and a name and password.

When it boots, it gives you the option of booting to either windows or Linux so I assume once installed, it is not windows dependent at all so you do get the Linux speed benefits?

I would like to do a dual boot system without compromising my current windows XP environment, if nothing else, just to have something new to play with. I know I'll always need windows for game playing and probably some of my photo editing stuff but if I can web browse, check email, play media, etc. thru Linux I think it would be fun to try.

geepondy said:

I would like to do a dual boot system without compromising my current windows XP environment, if nothing else, just to have something new to play with. I know I'll always need windows for game playing and probably some of my photo editing stuff but if I can web browse, check email, play media, etc. thru Linux I think it would be fun to try.

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I am currently typing this on a laptop running Ubuntu, which dual-boots Windows (very rarely).

Wubi is not necessary not to compromise the windows environment, as long as Windows has a separate partition on the hard drive.

Sorry I can't help you if you'd like to use Wubi specifically, as I have no experience with it.

However, I am sure if you go to ubuntuforums.org, a number of highly experienced users will take good care of you. Every time I've had an issue I went there and found a solution.

I second ubuntuforums.org. There's bound to be someone there that's familiar with wubi.

- Chris

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